End of my involvement

Hi folks

I will no longer be actively participating in the upkeep and evolution of Engineer Suite. The time commitment became too much and I felt that the community deserved better.

Thankfully Theodore from the Discord channel was happy to take over and he will set up a website etc in due course. I am sure that it will go from strength to strength under his guidance!

Thank you all for your support. I'll miss you :)

Maasq

New version amid hacking drama!

Hi folks

A new version released today amidst my hacking drama - it keeps my mind off the huge amount of money that is not yet back in my bank account!
I have revamped Equipment Engineer and it is now running at about 60% functionality for mundane items - magic items will be added once I have everything nailed down.

Item creation, loading and saving are all enabled, and the viewport shows you your data. You can also import from and export to the NPC weapon list.Still to come: parsing to FG and importing.

Other ideas:
See all equipment in the current project as a 'Player's Handbook' style list of tables.Save equipment lists to allow sharing between users.Load equipment lists.Build kits.Build packs.

What do you think? Any other suggestions? Please limit suggestions to mundane items for now - magic stuff comes later! Enjoy, and let me know what you think.
Maasq

Itching to start something new!

Table Engineer is getting close to being finished. I have to do something with the autoranging (as I have avoided it so far, LOL!) but I think that is its last feature before Par5e support.

I've got itchy fingers to start on Parcel Engineer. The only problem is that it relies on Equipment Engineer being finished. Picture me looking like a surly teenager being forced to tidy his bedroom. *sadface*

Hey Ho. Equipment Engineer looks like being a big addition now that magical items are being rolled into it and one that a lot of people would like to see. Time to bite the bullet and get to work, I think. :)

Off to scratch my itchy fingers....

Maasq

Welcome our newest arrival: Table Engineer!

I've been busy this summer.

The small updates from the last post led to a full-on obsession again and I have been dreaming about code. It is probably unhealthy but it gets shit done!

So what shit got done? Well, I built a whole new element of Engineer Suite - Table Engineer! I wasn't keen as it meant I had to learn to work with tables in RTF, but it was such a necessary part of the creation of FG modules I felt I had to grasp the nettle. I'm pleased with how it turned out, however.

I was going to rant about how horrible RTF is as a format to work with, but long time readers will know this already. I'll just leave this here as a reminder :)

Let me know what you think of Table Engineer, and if you want any features added. It isn't complete yet, but it is most of the way there!.

Maasq

Small changes

Hi folks!

There's a new update today - v0.5.15 - and it serves mostly as a bug fix update. There are a couple of new features, though, just to keep things interesting :)

As ever after the early summer marking frenzy (I am a teacher), it takes me a little while to get going again. Having a few bug fixes to approach and a couple of small new features helps me back into the swing of things. My code isn't the tidiest on the planet, so it takes a bit of effort to follow how my thinking had been going when I wrote it. I wish I could afford an assistant whose job was to tidy my code and comment it after I'd finished working on it each night!

OK, off to edit a video for the Patreon site.
Stay happy!

Steph

Enjoying it again :)

I have finally got the bug again.

I am enjoying programming now. There were quite a few months there where I felt I'd hit a wall. The whole process seemed like work and every task seemed to be huge. Worse, the longer I spent away from the keyboard the less I understood my own code. It was a bit of a vicious circle and I was worried I'd have to pass the project on to someone else.

Thankfully, though, I found a way back in. The people on the Discord channel had asked for a couple of things and this proved to be the impetus I needed. I've made a raft of small improvements and added a couple of what feel to be significant features. I've also had a change of direction re: what is happening next; Table Engineer seems to be what I want to do. I'm also excited to push on with the XML validation task. A change is as good as a rest, they say, and I am sure I will come roaring back at Equipment Engineer in the near future.

Cheers to one and all for support and feedback.

Maasq

Back on track with some updates!

It took me a while to get over my setback, but eventually I crawled back to the keyboard. I found the issue and managed to correct it, and got the bug back again. The most recent update has a couple of requested features - an improved Languages section, and the ability to deal with Psionic spellcasters. There's a load of other tweaks too.

What are you waiting for? Go download it!

I've added a few more videos over at the Patreon site too for subscribers there. If you've donated to me in any way in the past, you can have access to these videos too - just PM me in Discord and I'll give you the user rights.

Thanks as ever for the support, folks!

Maasq

Setback...

Hey folks!

I've rolled back to version 0.4.41 as I found a bug I couldn't correct in some of my recent updates. It's taken me a week to roll back because I also discovered an issue in Github Desktop - it didn't allow for rolling back!

I had to download another Git GUI (Sourcetree) and work out how the hell to use it, then create a new directory and download everything...

I found out something about myself. I don't deal all that well with setbacks :)  Growth mindset though. Doing the updates a second time will allow me to improve them, right?

I'm back to a position I can try to move forward from again. I apologise deeply if you had issues with recent FG modules and they were caused by my bug. Try compiling them again with this version and everything should be safe.

As ever, any issues you find - don't hesitate; give me grief on Discord!

Cheers
Maasq

New update - minor bug fixes

After yesterday's post I felt it was necessary to get my arse in gear and do some work. A couple of minor niggles had been pointed out in the past 5 weeks or so, and so I got down to fixing them.

Let me tell you this: the first half hour or so felt like I was wearing someone else's shoes or something. I had little clue what I was doing! It is amazing how quickly you de-skill if you don't work at something... Eventually, though, I got myself together and remembered both the structure of the app and how to write some code. I fixed four or five issues, and it felt GREAT! I have uploaded the fruits of today's work.

Next goal: more work on Equipment Engineer. Watch this space...!


Maasq

Starting up again...

Wow.... the Christmas rush, then the holiday period, then the post-holiday depression. 2 months have passed with no updates at all!

I've been hard at work trying to get caught up. I have added some videos to the Patreon site (https://www.patreon.com/engineersuite) and I updated the 1d6 Adventurer Compendium. I went through it all and standardised some of the presentation. It was a mammoth task, but it is done!

With those out of the way, it is about time I started programming again. That's where all of this started, after all!

Oh, and happy new year :)

Maasq

Equipment Engineer GUI finished!

I have started work on Equipment Engineer, and over the course of this week I have nailed down the GUI. This was always the biggest challenge of EE for me, as I couldn't quite see an easy way to do it. A tab for each type of item might have worked, but it would have been annoying. Cramming everything onto one page would be better, but confusing as not all items require all fields.

I settled on disabling all fields that don't pertain to the selected item type. This seems to work well, and early feedback seems to approve. I also moved descriptive text, No-ID text and item image to a second tab, freeing up plenty of space to work with.

A couple of decent discussions on Discord and the FG Forums helped distill my ideas, and threw up a couple of items that I knew nothing about. You'll now be able to set the crit range and the reroll trigger for a weapon. I also found out you can add more than one damage roll per weapon, and have multiple damage types. All of these new ideas show the benefit a 'hive mind' brings to a project, and it makes me grateful that there's a community building around Engineer Suite.

There are a couple of features I inend to build in that have got me excited. Firstly, weapons. NPC Engineer has a weapons table (for use by NPCs) and it makes sense to allow linking of these two areas. It'll take a bit of tweaking but I'll get there.

The other one is the ability to build a pack with items in it that can be dragged to a character's inventory. This isn't something you can do from within FG, so I am keen to get this enabled. As it will require a lot of data input to allow for a list to select from, this will be put off until the base load/save/parse functions are enabled.

So it seems I have some sort of creativity back, and I am enjoying my programming again. I have a roadmap. I feel all set to work EE through to completion in as short a time as possible.

Don't forget to check out the Patreon site for 'work in progress' videos that are freely available to everyone (and also the series of tutorial videos for Engineer Suite that are available to Patrons).

Let me know if anything is missing here, on Discord, on FG forums, on the Patreon site or on the Github issue tracker. :)

Thanks

Maasq